


The Incident

by redactredact



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, Fluff, House Party, Minor Bruce Banner/Betty Ross, Science, Science Lady-Bros, Smooching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 16:06:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3656586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redactredact/pseuds/redactredact
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years from now, when Betty Ross and Jane Foster are both PhD's running their own labs, Jane will refer to this as “The Incident”. Betty will refer to it as “Fuck you, Jane”.</p><p>Tony, they’ll agree, can never find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Incident

Jane has been dragged to this party, physically dragged, the friends she’s ostensibly visiting grabbing her by the wrists and forcefully separating her from her laptop. She’s going to have fun, they insist. She can’t work the whole time she’s here. _Yes I can_ , she wants to say, but she knows they won’t get off her back unless she lets them feel like they’ve tried.

Two hours later she’s sitting in a corner somewhere, alone, drunk. Shit-balls drunk. Drunk off her little suburban ass. It’s only grad school, and she didn’t party enough in college to get the hang of this routine, but she has the metabolism of a tiny white chick because she _is_ a tiny white chick, all 5’3” of her full of booze right to the very top. Her friends have abandoned her to dance. She is a party pooper, they declare, for not dancing, but she is within her rights to not dance. She’s here at their stupid party, it’s the least they can do to let her drink her way through it.

Not that she likes drinking, normally. The red Solo cup in her hand is almost empty, but she can’t be bothered to get up and refill it. She can’t be bothered to get up at all. She’s not sure if her legs would let her, and she doesn’t give enough of a shit to try.

“You okay?”

The words are soft, nearly whispered. Jane looks up and it’s like she’s looking into the face of a fairy-tale princess, all bright blue eyes and perfect skin and _gorgeous_ hair, _wow_ , she wishes her hair looked like that when it was long. It’s short now, since she shaved it off for a charity thing last semester and it’s still growing back, but when it’s long it _never_ looks that good.

The girl waves a hand in front of her, fairy-tale features compressing in concern.

“Hey, you there?” she asks, still barely breaking above a whisper, yet her voice cuts through the noise of the party like crystal.

Jane’s smile is somewhere between sloppy and stupid.

“Yeah, ‘m okay. Lil’ drunk.”

The girl’s smile is fucking _radiant_ , she’s probably half elf or some shit. She holds out a hand.

“Can I get you some water? I’ll fill your cup and come back,” she offers. Maybe not half elf. Maybe half angel. Jane is _very_ drunk.

When Jane is sober, she knows better than to drink things that have been handed to her by strangers, but she wants to trust this beautiful girl, so she nods and holds out her cup.

About a minute later, the girl returns with the Solo cup half full of water. It would have been quicker, but she had to rearrange her roommates' jello shots in the fridge to get at the Brita pitcher. The tap water in this armpit of a state is no good, as far as she is concerned, and she can’t escape it soon enough.

“Here,” she says, flashing that same radiant smile again as she hands Jane the cup. “Mind if I sit with you a minute?”

Jane takes a sip of water and shakes her head. What has she done to deserve such kindness? Has she _died?_ Can alcohol poisoning make you hallucinate?

The girl leans against, then slides down, the wall next to her, tucking her skirt neatly under her ass as she hits the floor. She brandishes her own glass, a proper glassware shotglass filled with some clear liquid that could probably also be water but might in fact be vodka.

“Cheers.”

Jane can only watch while she knocks it back in one go, staring a little too long and hard at the line of her throat, the soft place where it meets the bone of her jaw. The girl hisses through her perfect teeth as it goes down. Yep. Definitely vodka.

“I’m Betty.” She tilts her head to favor Jane with a softer smile. “Betty Ross.”

Jane’s eyes light up and she nearly drops her water. Instead, she settles for gaping, open-mouthed.

“You’re Betty Ross? Like, _Practical Applications of Gamma Radiation for Cellular Enhancement_ Betty Ross?!” Her voice pitches up; she can’t help it.

Betty laughs softly (everything she does is soft, delicate, deliberate) and nods.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“I read your, your paper! That paper. For seminar. _So_ cool. It’s, _wow_ , you’re actually you!” Jane is making an ass of herself and she does not care. How drunk is she? So drunk. Regret-this-in-the-morning drunk. Possibly regret-this-for-the-rest-of-your-life drunk.

Betty’s eyes drop to her glass, just for an instant. She’s...sad? That can’t be right.

“Thank you. I mean, that makes one person at this pity party who has,” she murmurs.

Jane is confused.

“But what about— I thought you were, I heard, don’t you—”

Wrong thing to say. Betty heaves a sigh, leaning her head back against the wall.

“Nah. No coauthors on this one, remember? R. B. Banner, Ph.D., is…” She closes her eyes. “Pursuing other collaborative opportunities.”

Jane stares.

Betty turns to look at her again. “What’d you say your name was?”

“I—” She gulps. “Jane. Jane Foster. I just started at Culver.”

Betty chokes out a laugh, the loudest thing Jane’s heard come out of her mouth so far, and for one desperate moment Jane has to wonder how loud Betty can get.

“Oh, god. Of course you did.” Because of course, that’s where Bruce has run off to, finishing his Ph.D. a year ahead of her and fucking right off out of town, leaving her here with their rented house that is now her rented house and their roommates who are now her roommates and a thesis to finish by May, because he just could not _wait_ to get out—of her way, he thinks, but the way it looks to Betty, he’s glad to be out of her life.

Jane could be wrong, but Betty kinda looks like she wants another drink. Betty kinda looks like she could use another drink, and probably a hug. But, again, Jane is too drunk to be reasonable about this, and she isn’t often this drunk, this pleasantly detached from the constant swirling of the vortex of her own mind, so she goes ahead and says something dumb.

“He’s an idiot.”

Betty squints. Now Betty’s the one who’s confused.

“For doing that. Not working with you, I mean,” Jane says, trying to choose her words carefully but mostly just grasping at whatever she can find through the fog of inebriation. She lifts her cup and takes a drink of water.

It's fucking great water.

“You’re real kind, Jane Foster,” Betty replies, but her smile hasn’t returned. God, Jane doesn’t even know her, just her work and her face, but she needs to see Betty smile again if it’s the last thing she does.

“‘s true. You’re brilliant. Your stuff’s brilliant,” she clarifies before Betty can contest her claim, like every smart girl she’s ever known has felt compelled to do. They’ve all had the fight stomped out of them since they were kids. It’s so hard to take a damn compliment, even if they know it’s true.

This time, Betty smiles, and the sadness in her eyes is like the deep purple-grey of clouds that begin to roll in before a storm and squeeze the world tight between shade on one end of the sky and sun on the other, driving all the colors up to eleven.

“Thank you, Jane Foster,” Betty says in that impossible whisper, and she’s leaning a little closer to Jane than Jane realized, and her smile is too perfect to be real, but there it is, pretty as a god damn picture.

Jane is drunk, but not too drunk to know a good thing when she sees it.

She leans in the rest of the way and kisses Betty right on the nose.

Jane _is_ too drunk to aim.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Jane wakes up on a couch she does not recognize, wrapped in a blanket she does not recognize, in a house she only vaguely remembers. She is phenomenally hungover. But her clothes are all still on, and the headache is definitely the hangover-y kind, so that’s a plus.

There’s noise coming from the kitchen—bare feet against tile, and sizzling, and then the smell of bacon.

 _BACON_.

She pulls the blanket around her shoulders and rises shakily from the couch, cursing her headache, cursing her head, cursing herself for not being able to do anything halfway including getting absolutely fucking trashed. Every step toward the kitchen brings her closer to the noise, and she can hear another layer in it, a voice, incredibly soft, delicate, deliberate.

 _We’ll drive, one thousand miles an hour,_   
_We’ll fly, by wheat fields and water towers,_   
_We’ll go—_

Something new hits the pan and crackles like a motherfucker.

 _We’ll go and we’ll go and we’ll go,_   
_Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go—_

Jane stands in the doorway of the kitchen and watches Betty hum the guitar solo over the stove. Betty knows she’s there, somehow—probably her elfin magic—and smiles over her shoulder.

“Didja sleep okay, Jane Foster?”

Jane nods, at a loss for words for a second or three before she has to ask.

“We didn’t—We didn’t _do_ anything, right? Did we?”

Betty laughs and shakes her head, still smiling.

“Nah. You were pretty drunk. And I was also pretty drunk,” she reflects, pursing her lips. “We kissed a little, though. And then you basically passed out.”

Jane closes her eyes, trying to remember.

 _Yes_.

She’d come to this ridiculous party, which turned out to be at the house of the grad student whose paper she’d just presented at first-year seminar. She’d gotten well and truly plastered. And then she’d gotten herself kissed by an angel.

She opens her eyes and Betty’s handing her a plate of bacon and fried egg and smiling like she’s the sun itself.

“C’mon, let’s eat. I wanna hear about your research.”

**Author's Note:**

> My long-suffering beta Horrorwine is a glorious enabler.
> 
> The song Betty sings is 1000 Miles Per Hour by OK Go.


End file.
